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A 7-Step Guide To Creating Your Content Strategy

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In this post:

How It Starts

“Coming up with the right Content Marketing Strategy for your business is a no-brainer”, you might say. You dress up the main stages you go over in some fancy terms like:

and you think you’ve done a fantastic job. That may be so, but often it is far from being enough. However, if you really pay attention to the details and invest time in your research you can eventually become one of those amazing competitors you benchmark against and soon other businesses will try to imitate your strategy rather than the other way round.

How could you achieve that?

Make sure to incorporate the following steps in your Content Marketing Strategy:

1. Define Your Goals

Start by setting your business objectives: in order to select the right path, you should first decide where you’re heading.

Consider which are the essential goals that your content is to achieve. You might wish to concentrate on attracting your target audience’s interest, engaging them and motivating them to:

Once you’ve set the goals that fit your business culture and mission, it would be much easier to take your first steady steps towards drafting your Content Marketing Strategy:

2. Define Your Target Audience

This step is still part of the planning stage, but as it’s clearly stated in the ancient Chinese strategy study, The Art of War, in times of ‘war’ you’d be lost if you don’t plan ahead.

It is essential to understand that in this post we won’t discuss how to define your target customers. You should have done this way before you have founded your business. Instead during this step we will try to help you define the right audience for your company content.

That being said, you might have already reckoned that the target customers for your products/services not necessarily coincide with the target audience for your content. Sounds frustrating? Let me explain …

When you create content with certain goals in mind, the smart thing to do is to reach out to people that could help you find a shortcut to achieving those goals. Outreaching to industry influencers would be a fine approach in this regard, for such personas have already attracted the attention and respect of your target audience. If you manage to persuade those influencers to convey your company message, your content would have a greater impact and would enjoy broader reach, no doubt.

For instance, if your goal is to popularize your brand you will focus on grabbing the attention of journalists focusing on your niche, renowned industry speakers, frequently quoted bloggers that your target customers read and so on. All of those could be called ‘industry influencers’ and, in this case, could be perceived as your target audience.

You can’t have a successful Content Marketing Strategy without exceling at this stage so take time to select your right target audience. Your selection will influence all of the remaining steps of the process, including picking up the proper tone of voice, content format, distribution channel, and posting frequency.

3. Select The Proper Home for Your Content

This one is tough. Especially if you wish to post your content on an external website instead of on your own company blog.

Feeding your company blog with ‘high quality’, ‘relevant’, and ‘useful’ content is an absolute must. However, if you wish to add to your Content Marketing Strategy some additional flair in terms of Link Building, excuse my French, you could try to create good content for a popular blog and spread the reach of your marketing efforts. This process deserves a post on its own, but for the sake of the argument here, I’m going to list down what are your top options of finding a home for you content abroad (outside your company website):

Usually the best choice is to combine your efforts and create content both for your blog and for external authority websites. Here you have two options:

Under the first option you will have to increase your productivity rate in order to cover your own blog and to ‘guest blog’ at other sites. You need to set aside time for building relationships and gaining the trust of the specific blog owners because rarely people managing respected websites will welcome open-heartedly a stranger’s offer to contribute with content.

The second option also hides certain risks worth mentioning. Entering the realm of SEO specifics: you need to keep in mind that Google is not a ‘huge fan’ of duplicate content. So if you wish to post your content twice or multiple times on the net, the chances are that Google will catch it up and will try to make it up for it.

So, if you have reposted your content on a high authority website (higher ranking than yours) then, most probably, the page on your company website, that is housing the same content, won’t rank in Google. The search engine will disregard the multiple copies of the given content and will rank the ‘original’ source, which more often than not will be the more trustworthy website.

This will result in lost organic traffic at your end (for the particular syndicated content piece). This could be either good or bad, depending on the exposure the external site brings to your content. If the content syndication helps you reach a wider audience – by all means go for it, but don’t turn Content Syndication in your prime Content Marketing Strategy.  

4. Define The Distribution Channels

You have a lot of options here; let’s see the 3 key channel groups that you can opt from:

On the other hand if you have a lot of visuals it makes sense to publish those on Pinterest too. Pinterest hides huge potential, just as Instagram does, so don’t necessarily opt for the most popular (Twitter and Facebook) social channels but consider other options too: LinkedIn, SnapChat, StumbleUpon.

The essential thing to remember here is to diversify your distribution channels. Putting all your eggs in one basket has never been a wise thing to do.

5. Define The Posting Frequency

When you’ve already defined the ‘home of your content’ you should proceed towards drafting a posting calendar. For instance as it comes to your company blog you could choose specific dates when you’ll post a given type of content. An example of a weekly posting schedule with high posting frequency could be:

Monday: Past week recap

Tuesday: Case Study post

Wednesday: Expert Interview

Thursday: Event Recap

Friday: Comic (Industry Joke)

If you are posting on external sites, though, you should learn to be flexible with the editors’ calendars. If you have limited resources and small content creation team you could skip a date in your company blog posting calendar when you get published on an external website.

Whatever posting frequency you chose for your Content Marketing Strategy, remember that you should constantly try to improve it. Monitor which are the days of the week when you blog attracts higher readership and schedule your best pieces for those days. For the slower days, try to come up with more entertaining content formats that will boost your blog traffic. Depending on your target audience those may vary from infographics, surveys, quizzes, competitions, giveaways, and so on.

6. Define Content Format

Often when it comes down to Content Strategy people limit their imagination to articles and blog posts only. However, there is so much more that you could experiment with:

7. How to Attract Interest

The webs is crowded with content and in the midst of this ‘information-overload’ your message should rise up and inspire, entrap or deeply touch your target audience in order to leave a vivid trace in their memory. This could be quite a challenge, fortunately we’re to share with you a couple of tricks on how to achieve that:

8. Use Supporting Visuals

I know the blog post reads “A 7-STEP GUIDE …”, but I thought, if you’ve read so far you deserve some extra intel, a reward of sorts that will shed some light on the small details that make the whole difference.

So if your content is a plain blog post, a long case study or a whitepaper you need to break the monotony and add some flair to the text-packed piece:

On the other hand you could also use screenshots in your article, though they may have limited application for they are mainly used in case study posts. Of course you could also trust your own creativity and make your own unique shots to spruce up your article.

9. Fine Tuning

You’ve made it to the final stage! Your Content Marketing Strategy is all set and you are ready to test it. Be patient and closely examine the results of your planning. You have an ongoing responsibility to evaluate the results of the choices you’ve made when forging your strategy and if they don’t trigger the expected engagement, you are entitled to ‘fine tune’ them. Be ruthless as it comes to changing your content format, distribution channels, posting channels – everything that seems to hold you back from your goals should be identified and corrected. And remember: